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Mastering addition is essential to success in mathematics. Besides practicing with traditional flash cards, you can teach your students some simple tricks to remember the rules so they can later apply them to more complex calculations. Students should know how to count and write out numbers from one to 10 before you begin teaching more complicated addition. Mastering addition with simple tips and tricks lays the foundation for continued learning, including subtraction, multiplication and division.
Basic Strategies
Begin teaching addition by building on counting. For example, ask your students to count up one more number from seven to reach eight. Show them that seven plus one is the same thing, eight. Counting up two from seven is nine and so on. Students quickly recognize their own comprehension and math does not seem so hard after all.
Simple Rules
State some simple rules, such as adding zero to a number always results in the number staying the same. Having your students memorize the answers to adding a number to itself can be useful, so practice remembering two plus two is four, three plus three is six, and so on up to 10 plus 10 is 20. Use manipulative devices, such as blocks, to reinforce this concept. Another way to visualize the addition of numbers is to use a number line.
Basic Addition Combinations
Once your students recognize that two plus one is the same as one plus two, they are ready to solve all 44 basic addition combinations. Set up contests and challenges to motivate your students. Then, practice counting by 10s. After that, teach how to add two digit numbers by using the expanded form (13 is 10 plus 3.) Your students will quickly discover that it is easier to add 13 plus 14 if they think of it as 10 plus 3 plus 10 plus 4. Use this idea to add three and even four digit numbers.
